For the Bouquets to Art 2017 show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Samantha Williams, along with Clara McInerney and Dimitri Tretiakoff, created a window niche design commenting on the Golden Gate Park landscape outdoors. Photo by Barbara Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

It’s that time of year again. It’s spring — in California anyway. Daffodils and tulips are poking their heads up around the San Francisco Bay Area. And flower lovers have once again flocked to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to see what local floral designers are up to these days.

Michael Daigian, with Jennifer Lato, was inspired by Sean Scully’s “Wall of Light Horizon, 2005, for Bouquets to Art 2017. Dramatic boxed floral designs like this one were popular this year. Photo by Barbara Newhall

The occasion was the annual Bouquets to Art show at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s de Young. Dozens of local designers are invited to participate in the event each year by riffing on one of the de Young’s works of art using flowers, sticks, bulbs and seed pods. And this year, some of them seemed to be hell-bent on mastering the art of the two-dimensional floral arrangement.

This flat floral design by Poppy’s Petalworks of San Francisco spirals down to a clutch of still-green tulip buds. I think it’s the compactness of these boxed arrangements that enchants me. Photo by Barbara Newhall.

I took in the show toward its end this year, on a Saturday, and the bouquets, now nearly a week old, were holding up nicely. As always, my favorites were the arrangements that relied almost entirely on natural ingredients. Flat, boxed designs were legion. And they bowled me over with their quirky charm.

Another way to do a flat, two-dimensional design — enclose petals in glass or plastic: “Garden Party,” by Amy Roman Vassar, San Francisco, in response to Frank Stella’s — also very two-dimensional — “Lettre sur les aveugles II, 1974.” Photo by Barbara Newhall

“Totem,” by Sharpstick Studio, Oakland, dominated the deYoung Museum’s Wilsey Court for the Bouquets to Art 2017 exhibition. That’s a real tree hanging from the ceiling, complete with branches, roots and rings cut from the tree’s own trunk. Genius. Photo by Barbara Newhall

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ABOUT BARBARA

Barbara Falconer Newhall reports from the scene on life with an unruly garden, techie husband, far-flung, grown-up kids -- and a rocky spiritual journey, which she describes in her prize-winning book, Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith.

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